


as above

by baliset



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, loss of speech, maincord prohibited swearing, null team, promise me you'll think about the implications (of Under Over)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29849124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset
Summary: The Trenchshuddered.That was the only way anyone could think of to describe it.(or: under over, over under.)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	as above

The Trench _shuddered_. That was the only way anyone could think of to describe it. There were voices on the switchboard - excited voices, people screaming about the Crabs coming back, about floods, about the new teams that had landed. And then the whole place shuddered, once, violently, the labyrinthine halls almost seeming to breathe. As though the structure was waking up. As though the Null Team had, for all these years, been living on the back of some unknown beast that now threatened to shake them off. The tremor was over as soon as it started, but lasted long enough to be acknowledged, knocking over players on the field and startling others out of their beds, the ground lurching beneath them like waves on an unsteady sea.

It concluded to nothing but silence. The factions of the team on the field found themselves released by the pull of the Trench, as though it perhaps had better things to do than force them to play the same game of blaseball they’d been playing since the season had started in the Immateria, still tied 0-0. The players all stuttered uneasily to halts, puppets with their strings cut, some lifting themselves from where they’d fallen.

“So what the f□ck was that?” Shaq asked, with no qualms on being the first to break the silence. They were still - maybe _growing into_ wasn’t the right phrase, but their voice had started to change in the way the Trench changed voices only recently, and it still sounded strange even to their own ears. It could have been worse. They kept telling themself that, but it was still hard to make themself believe it.

“Crabs did something.” That was Combs, ascending the steps to the dugout, hair trailing on the ground behind them. “Obviously.”

“To the _Trench_?”

“Didn’t you hear the emergency warning?” Miki asked. She’d been running to third and had gotten knocked off-kilter in the middle of lowering herself down to slide. Now she stayed down in the dirt, propping herself up on one elbow. “Over under, under over. Whatever that means.”

“Whatever that f□cking means,” Shaq agreed, sullen. Surprises had never sat well with them. The Trench tended to be less full of surprises than real blaseball - but _this_ , this was something else entirely. This wasn’t anything that they had a frame of reference for. And, apparently, neither did anyone else.

It was a small comfort that they could storm off the field. The halls of the Trench had settled, but they felt unfamiliar somehow, like Shaq was navigating them in a dream. Paths they should have recognized dead-ended at doors they’d never seen before, and the crude arrows and words other Null players had etched into the black marble walls were gone, smoothed over and disappeared. The change made Shaq’s throat tighten. Every wrong turn was like a knife in their gut, twisted slowly, and it was all they could do to force their mind empty enough to not think about where they wanted to go, and let the labyrinth lead them to the Hall of Flame on its own.

Derrick was already there - no surprise - standing in the shadow of his own statue. Sebastian was there, too, and Tiana, and Zi, and Stevie, and Kirby, and a gaggle of other faces and names Shaq saw much less of on the regular, all gathered around the large windows that made up one wall of the Hall. Shaq slipped in behind Tiana, jostling her with their shoulder, catching her eye when she looked down.

“What’s going on?”

“The water,” Tiana said, with a slight nod towards the window. “It started going up. Now it’s gone.”

She was right. The glass was wet with condensation and fog, hard to see beyond, but the usual dark ocean that waited just outside was gone. And maybe the Monitor was out there, somewhere, but no one had seen it since the start of the season, so maybe it was gone, too. Maybe the Null Team was alone, more alone than they’d ever been before.

“So,” Shaq said, “are we gonna break a f□cking window or what?”

The eye of the crowd turned on them, but it wasn’t malicious.

“Sure,” Zi said. “You first.”

 _Can’t hurt to try_ , Seb chimed, maybe too optimistically. He was standing next to Derrick - they were holding hands, in fact, but Derrick pulled away from Seb and back towards the statues that lined the sides of the Hall.

“ _Breaking out of here tonight_ ,” he muttered, just loud enough for Shaq to hear and recognize it, maybe meant to be a private joke between the two of them. Shaq saw Derrick grip the sides of one of the metal buckets of peanuts and understood instantly, took a step back alongside everyone else just seconds before Derrick hammered it against the glass.

The window splintered; no water came through. Derrick brought the corner of the bucket down again once, then again and again in an errant drumbeat, smashing a hole and then smashing it wider, to the size of a person. Still no water came through. Mist filtered in instead, clinging to the skin on Shaq’s arms and the fabric of their uniform, cold condensation that made them shiver. When Derrick stopped to look out of the hole he’d made, Shaq joined him, leaning out as far as they dared - then farther, until Derrick grabbed the collar of their jersey to keep them from tumbling out into the open air below their feet.

And it _was_ open air. Shaq’s breath caught in their throat. They had tasted fresh air again every single time they’d possessed Esme, but they had never tasted it in their own body, not since they’d come to the Trench. The air in the Trench was always stale somehow, but the air that came through the window now was real, so cold and crisp that it almost felt _tangible_ in their lungs.

They were outside. The Trench was _outside_. What Shaq had thought was mist they now recognized as clouds surrounding the window - maybe the whole Trench, though they could only see what their limited vantage point allowed. They let their toes slip off the end of the window ledge, their heels still planted on the floor of the hall, and a laugh bubbled out from their chest unasked for as a breeze ran through their hair. There was no sun, but they tilted their face up as if to meet it anyway, letting their glasses fog with condensation.

And then they looked down. Or they would have, if there was a down to look at.

Shaq had always conceived of the Trench as a long building at the bottom of the ocean, a singular structure that existed on its own and stretched out for miles. They found now that either things had changed, or things had not always been that way to begin with. The Trench - or the floor the Null Team currently stood on - was one floor of a larger building, a building that appeared to stretch up and down for miles in either direction. There was no ground, just a long, obsidian tower that disappeared into the clouds below, no base in sight.

“Oh,” Tiana said. She had joined Shaq and Derrick at the window ledge, one hand tightly gripping Derrick’s free arm. “Under over.”

“People keep f□cking saying that,” Shaq said. Their glasses were still unusable - they couldn’t see Tiana’s expression, though she turned to look at them all the same.

“Shaq, we’re Up.”

“Oh, f□ck me,” Shaq said. “Under f□cking over, I guess.”

**Author's Note:**

> hi. someone in the crabitat pointed out the implications of the coin flip and the flood coming from Under meaning that blaseball 2 was now Under instead of Over, and the implications made me lose my mind.
> 
> you can find me on twitter @corpserevivers, on tumblr as kentuckycorpsereviver, or in the crabitat discord server. comments are as always appreciated.


End file.
